What Lionsgate, Jordan Peele and Sam Raimi Just Told Indie Filmmakers
The latest horror deal confirms a major shift in what makes movies financeable—and what producers should be building while they chase cast.
Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Lionsgate just acquired Portrait of God, a feature adaptation of Dylan Clark’s viral horror short, with Chase Infiniti set to star. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are producing through Ghost House Pictures, while Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld are producing through Monkeypaw Productions. It will be the first time Raimi and Peele have produced a film together.
That is enough top-shelf talent to make the announcement interesting without much additional help. But if you’re an independent filmmaker or producer, I don’t think the biggest lesson from the deal is that Lionsgate got into business with Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele, or even that Chase Infiniti is starring in another major horror project.
The part I would pay attention to is where Portrait of God came from. Clark didn’t walk into Hollywood with only a screenplay and a promise that an audience might eventually like it; the project originated as his 2022 short of the same name, which developed a substantial audience online before the feature package came together.
We’ve seen this movie before. Literally.
This spring, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, developed from the world he built through his YouTube shorts, opened to $81.5 million in North America and $118 million worldwide. It was the biggest opening in A24’s history, while fellow YouTube filmmaker Curry Barker’s Obsession had already passed $100 million domestically by the same weekend.
By the end of the summer, Backrooms had reached $394.1 million worldwide and Obsession had passed $509 million. Hollywood responded in the most Hollywood way possible: studios, agencies and production companies began chasing additional YouTube creators and internet-native properties, looking for the next one.
The obvious conclusion is that Hollywood has discovered YouTube filmmakers.
I think that conclusion is about three levels too shallow.
Hollywood is rediscovering that an audience can be part of the package. And from where I sit selling independent movies every day, that is happening at exactly the same time that another historically dominant part of the package is becoming less powerful on its own: name talent.
Two Things Are Starting to Separate the Winners
There are exceptions to every rule in this business, and I’m not suggesting that every successful independent movie needs a YouTube following. But when I look at the films we’re representing at S&R that are breaking away from comparable pictures, I increasingly see two characteristics.
The first is almost embarrassingly simple: the movie is actually good. Not “good for the budget.” Not a good cast package. Not a recognizable actor surrounded by 80 minutes of material the audience has to endure to get back to them. The execution delivers on whatever promise got the viewer to press Play in the first place.
The second is that the movie arrives with some form of demonstrable audience. Proven box office remains the clearest evidence because somebody has already taken out a credit card and bought the product. But we’re also seeing meaningful value from audiences developed elsewhere, including online communities and, when properly executed, crowdfunding.
These two variables don’t affect value in exactly the same way, and this is where our experience at S&R becomes more interesting to me than the headlines.
Based on what we’re seeing in our international sales business, a well-executed movie can sell into approximately twice as many territories as a comparable movie that doesn’t deliver creatively. That doesn’t necessarily mean Germany suddenly pays twice as much, Japan pays twice as much and the UK pays twice as much. Often they don’t.
But sell 20 territories instead of ten and you don’t need the individual license fees to double. The aggregate revenue changes dramatically.
A proven audience can have an even more immediate effect. We’ve seen movies that I would otherwise expect to generate low-six-figure minimum guarantees potentially reach toward $1 million in aggregate MGs when there is convincing evidence of an audience already waiting for the film. In North America alone, credible audience evidence can move a valuation from five figures into six figures very quickly.
Those aren’t published industry averages. They’re observations from films and deals we’re actively working on, and individual results obviously vary by genre, package, territory and execution. But the magnitude is large enough that I don’t consider the phenomenon theoretical anymore.
That’s why I don’t think Portrait of God is just another story about Hollywood mining YouTube.
It’s another data point in a fundamental repricing of risk.
The New York Times Bestseller of 2026 May Be a YouTube Channel
Hollywood has always searched for evidence that an audience exists before spending tens of millions of dollars trying to create one.
In the 1980s and 1990s, one of the cleanest signals was publishing. A major bestseller gave producers something extraordinarily valuable: evidence that people had already chosen to spend money and time engaging with the underlying IP before Hollywood ever turned it into a movie.
I increasingly think YouTube occupies a similar position today, with one enormous difference. The feedback is faster, more visible and considerably more granular.
A creator can release something and discover whether people watch it, share it, discuss it and ask for more. They can build worlds and characters over multiple pieces of content before anyone spends $20 million making the feature version. The platform effectively allows filmmakers to conduct years of audience development in public.
And the scale is no longer something Hollywood can dismiss as kids watching videos on their phones. Nielsen measured YouTube at a record 14.2% of all U.S. television viewing in July 2026, while streaming as a whole represented 49% of television usage.
The theatrical evidence is becoming equally difficult to dismiss. Backrooms didn’t merely demonstrate that Kane Parsons had followers; it demonstrated that a significant number of those people could be converted into theatrical customers. Its opening was more than three times A24’s previous opening-weekend record.
But here’s where producers need to be careful, because Hollywood has chased versions of this idea before and frequently misunderstood it.
Followers are not necessarily an audience, because an audience is a group of people who have demonstrated that they want the thing you’re trying to sell them. Those are very different propositions, and understanding the difference may be worth real money when you finance a movie.
Ten Million Followers May Not Mean What Your Pitch Deck Says It Means
For years, producers have put the aggregate social-media following of their casts into financing decks. I still see it, and it’s one of the fastest ways to make me skeptical of the audience section of a business plan.
If your five actors collectively have ten million followers, you do not necessarily have access to ten million unique people. Their audiences overlap, sometimes substantially. Five young actors appealing to essentially the same demographic don’t create five completely independent pools of consumers simply because somebody added the follower counts together in Excel.
More importantly, following a person does not demonstrate a willingness to buy an unrelated product that person happens to appear in. A person may follow an actor because they liked them in a television series, because they enjoy their social content or because they simply find them interesting; none of those actions demonstrates that they will spend money on a theatrical ticket or rent an independent movie because that actor appears in it.
That is the difference between the Portrait of God signal and the “our cast has 10 million combined followers” slide. The audience for Portrait of God demonstrated interest in Portrait of God.
I’ve seen versions of this phenomenon well before Obsession and Backrooms made it fashionable. Properly developed built-in audiences, including audiences demonstrated through successful crowdfunding campaigns, have been enough in our experience to drive three-to-ten-times increases in projections compared with what we otherwise would have expected from certain packages.
Again, that is firsthand market experience, not a published industry multiplier. I would never tell a producer to plug “crowdfunding = 7x” into a finance model, because the entire question is whether the audience evidence is credible.
The larger point is that demonstrated behavior changes risk. That is what producers should be trying to build.
But an audience only solves the first half of the problem. It can get people through the door, and recognizable cast can still do exactly the same thing.
What neither one can guarantee anymore is that the audience stays.
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The obvious lesson from Portrait of God, Backrooms and Obsession is that filmmakers should start building audiences earlier. Everyone is already saying that. But the bigger lessons could change how you finance your next movie, and how you explain the changing market to investors.
Audience and execution are both being repriced. One can reduce risk before release; the other increasingly determines what happens after audiences press Play. Together, they’re changing how I think about cast spend, MGs, recoupment and the lifetime value of a film.
Continue reading to learn about:
Why the package that gets an investor’s money back fastest may not be the package that ultimately makes the most money.
What we’re seeing happen to MG valuations when a film can demonstrate a real audience rather than a theoretical one.
Why mediocre cast-driven movies are losing the long tail they once enjoyed.
How execution is translating into substantially broader international sales for films we’re currently representing.
Which forms of “built-in audience” deserve a premium—and which impressive-looking numbers I largely discount.
How I would think about allocating a $3 million budget between recognizable cast, execution and audience.
Why I believe we may be entering the first period since the arrival of sound when name talent matters less than other variables in determining a movie’s commercial value.
This is where the public trend intersects with what we’re actually seeing in current sales and distribution. Before you spend another $500,000 or $1 million buying “bankability,” you should understand what the market may increasingly be willing to pay for instead.
